Slice of Life

Los Angeles televiewers this week got a closeup look at some extremely fancy shenanigans: they watched two collection-agency men in a fascinating demonstration of the techniques of repossessing an automobile. The two approached four locked cars, and using burglars' tools and master keys, opened the doors. As the camera peered over their shoulders, they showed how to "hot wire" a car (i.e., bypass the ignition lock) to start the engine. Then they demonstrated another favorite gadget of "repo" men: an equalizer tube for quick inflation of tires in case delinquent owners have deliberately flattened tires to ward off repossession. The collection agents, legally entitled to repossess cars parked in public areas, explained that they sometimes ply their trade even when a car is on private property.

This sharp look at a rugged profession was telecast over Los Angeles' independent KTTV by an enterprising producer named Paul Coates. Last year Coates, a columnist for the Los Angeles Mirror, decided to create a hard-hitting television program that, he says, would do the things "a newspaperman can do on television. I had written some scripts for Dragnet . . . The greatest attraction there is stark reality in dialogue and faces. I wanted to do a show with real realism. As part of my job on the Mirror, I see the petty hoodlums, prostitutes, homosexuals, unwed mothers, people victimized by racket. Television had not explored this area, and I decided to do it."

B-Girls. Coates, a 33-year-old New Yorker, lined up a cameraman and a producer--the Mirror's former assistant news editor, Jim Peck. He called his show Confidential File and set out to find some offbeat stories. He did not have to search far. His first show exposed the B-girl (barroom shill) racket in Los Angeles. Since then Coates has run programs on a homosexual (who freely showed his face on the program and was fired from his job the next day), shoplifters in action, a narcotics addict, a hypnotized woman, singing Brahms's Lullaby, giving birth to a baby.

"On one show we interviewed a pyromaniac. I asked him why he set fires. He said it gave him a good feeling and that he felt peaceful. He had once been a member of a volunteer Los Angeles Fire Department before getting into trouble, and he came to the show wearing a fireman's cap." Says Coates: "It's amazing how people consent to appear on our show. I can't believe it's anything but exhibitionism in most cases. We don't pay them anything. If they're broke and we feel 15 bucks will help them for a few days, we give them that. We salestalk them into coming on the show on the grounds that their appearance will help others. But if you ask me, I still think exhibitionism is at the root of it."

Unhappy Medium. Coates has hired a lie-detector expert, who weeds out phonies trying to get on the program, sometimes uses the detector on the program itself. Once, after showing infrared pictures of seances run by a spiritualist, he gave the lie-detector test to the medium. She flunked it miserably. Says Coates: "In stead of turning people against her, we got many letters saying it was a terrible thing to do to that poor woman. We also used the detector on a so-called jet-propulsion expert who claimed that he had flown in a flying saucer from White Sands, N.Mex. to New York in half an hour. He failed the test on the air and got furious in front of the camera."

Although Coates admittedly tries for sensationalism, he claims "a fastidiousness" in the handling. "At no time do I cast myself in the role of the expert," he says. "I play the reporter. We carefully use psychiatrists and authorities in any particular field . . . Even on crime stuff, I'm just a reporter and let the police and others say why a certain kind of bunko game, for instance, is a danger to the community . . . The main purpose of the show is to take the viewer where he couldn't or wouldn't ordinarily go. It's a slice of life."

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